We are besotted by celebrity. For most of us, the rich and famous take on a god-like status and our own lives seem small, empty, and hardly worth living in comparison to what we imagine theirs to be.

Fame, we believe, gives someone a life bigger than our own. We live in just one place, anonymous, domestic, unknown, but someone who is famous, whose face is recognized everywhere and whose name is a household word, it would seem, is everywhere, omnipresent like God. No wonder we view them as gods and give them worship.

But there’s more: We also believe that fame gives immortality. Famous people may die, but they live on – Marilyn, Elvis, Diana, we don’t even need last names. Something about them stays, more than a gravestone. Fame leaves an indelible mark. Our fear is that our small lives won’t leave that. We disappear, the famous remain.

So it isn’t surprising that we are so besotted with the famous. They appear to us as gods – omnipresent and immortal.

But does fame really make one’s life larger? If someone’s face appears on billboards and magazine covers everywhere is he or she in some real way everywhere? Does a celebrity’s larger-than-life status indeed make their lives larger than ours? Does fame accord some kind of immortality?

At a superficial level, yes. To be a household name and to leave a legacy ingrained inside of peoples’ consciousness does, in a manner of speaking, make one omnipresent and does give one a certain kind of immortality.

But, being larger-than-life and having immortality, are very ambiguous concepts. There’s something very vaporous and unreal in the kind of omnipresence and immortality that fame brings. You can’t eat it and you aren’t present just because your name is. At the end of the day, fame doesn’t really enlarge you, nor give you the kind of immortality for which you really long. There’s enough loneliness, paranoia, fearfulness, breakdown, bitterness, drug abuse, and flat-out emptiness in the lives of celebrities to more than vouch for this. It’s no accident the three celebrities mentioned above – Marilyn, Elvis, and Diana – died as they did. Celebrity, of itself, doesn’t make one larger than life nor accord immortality.

What does enlarge our lives and give immortality? Compassion and contemplation.

Compassion: All the great religious traditions, from Hinduism to Christianity, teach that what makes our lives small is not place, anonymity, and occupation, but selfishness, self-preoccupation, ego, and narcissism. My life is small and petty precisely when it’s centered upon myself. However, when I can, through empathy, break a little the casings of my own selfishness and connect myself to the feelings and thoughts of others, by that very connection, my life becomes larger.

I know a hermit who has lived by himself for more than 35 years. He lives alone and his existence is known to few people. Yet, paradoxically, his life is really larger-than-life. He’s the most connected man I know. When he prays at night, alone, by his own description, he “feels the very heartbeat of the planet, and feels the joys and sufferings of everyone.”

That’s the very opposite of an experience we so commonly have when, inside the very buzz of social life, we feel nothing but our own obsessive restlessness and the smallness of our lives.

Contemplation works in the same paradoxical way: We connect ourselves most deeply to the world and we taste immortality when we are in solitude, in contemplation. What is that?

Contemplation is not a state of mind where we don’t think of anything, a blankness beyond distraction. Nor is it necessarily thinking lofty, sublime, or holy thoughts. Contemplation is, as Thomas Merton so aptly defined it, a state within which we are present to what is actually going on in our lives, and to the timeless, eternal dimensions inside of that. We are in solitude and contemplation when we are really aware that we are drinking water when we are drinking water.

Here’s how he, Merton, describes a graced moment of contemplation:

“[Today] it is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and one’s sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to gradually forget program and artifice.”

We are so besotted by celebrities because we are always looking outside of ourselves to find what is timeless, what can enlarge us, and give us immortality. But what we are looking for is already inside of us, something we must awaken ourselves to, namely, our union through compassion with everything that is and our tasting of what’s immortal and eternal through being aware of the cold and the warmth inside of our own lives.

For Christmas last year, I was given a cell-phone (a “mobile phone”, in European terms). I’d always resisted buying one for a couple of reasons.

First off, I’m already too accessible, as are most of us. The poet, Rumi, once said: “I have lived too long where I can be reached!” Wonderfully put. We can no longer go out for dinner, have a family outing, take a day off, or go on vacation without life intruding back in on us. The opportunity for instant and constant distance-communication has, no doubt, made our lives more efficient, but it has also made them more demanding and has robbed most of us of the precious few chances we still have to get away from the pressures of life. We are too accessible.

Beyond that, I have been perennially irritated by the over-use, mis-use, and useless-use of cell-phones. It is no longer possible to be in almost any public place and not be within earshot of someone talking on a cell-phone. I glance around public places sometimes – airports, parks, coffee bars, public squares, parks – and notice that virtually everyone is either speaking on one, punching information into one, or at least holding one in his or her hands. They’re omnipresent.

With that being said, I do admit that they are a marvelous invention and have saved lives. They’re also a wonderful convenience. In the two months that I’ve had mine, it has already twice bailed me out while driving and getting lost, allowed me to reschedule a flight while stranded in a storm, facilitated airport pick-ups on several occasions, and given me instant access from anywhere to colleagues, family, and friends.

But still, I’m hardly a convert. Cell-phones still too often irritate me. Why?

More superficially, I get the impression that too many of us still think that being engaged in a cell-phone conversation in a public place makes us look important. I may be wrong and, God-willing, the near universality of the phenomenon should soon enough erase any such illusions.

More seriously, I’m concerned about how cell-phones are changing the way we relate and deforming us somewhat both in our capacity for attention and in our propriety. Let me explain:

First, regarding our capacity for attention: I agree with Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) when he suggests that mobile phones, text-messaging, emails, and other such media are making us so accessible to everybody that paradoxically we are becoming accessible to nobody. We are communicating all the time and, strangely, becoming lonelier in the process, more isolated from each other. Studies show that today, inside off of this instant and continuous communication, we in fact have fewer close friends and family life is being strained by technology, not enhanced by it. Technology is dividing us perhaps more than uniting us.

Beyond this, our excessive preoccupation with technological communication is producing in us something Friedman calls continuous partial attention disorder. We are becoming the antithesis of a contemplative. How do you stay in touch with your deep center when you are constantly pulled in all directions?

Recently in an airport, I sat beside a young man who was listening to an i-pod, working on his lap-top, and speaking on his cell-phone all at the same time. I suspect he would protest that he is now part of a generation that can “multi-task”. Perhaps there’s some worth in that since the capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time is indeed a virtue. But I would be wary of his contemplative capacities, just I would of his manners. Too often the capacity to “multi-task” is also the capacity to be impolite and inattentive to more than one person at the same time.

Then there is also what cell-phones are doing to us in terms of public propriety, etiquette, and manners.

In essence, we have turned the whole world into a phone-booth. But is that a bad thing? Efficiency-wise, no; but propriety-wise, yes.

Phone-booths were invented for a good reason, as were living rooms, offices, bedrooms, parks, living rooms, restaurants, dining rooms, theatres, and churches. We sit in public places today and we over-hear conversations that have to do with business, family life, intimacy, and trivia which propriety and manners suggest would be better conducted precisely inside of offices, living rooms, bedrooms, and parks – or at least in the relative privacy of a phone-booth. But the whole world is now becoming a phone-booth, just as it is also becoming a business office, a living room, a bedroom, and a venue for endless chatter in public about trivia that is best talked about in private. Cell-phones have not made for good hygiene, psychic or social.

In the end, cell-phones are a good thing. Sadly though our common sense and manners haven’t kept pace with the technology.

Thirty years ago, Philip Rieff wrote a book entitled, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In essence, he argued that today, in the Western world, so many people need psychological therapy mainly because our family structure has grown weak and many community structures have broken down. In societies where there are still strong families and strong communities, he contends, there is little need for private therapy; people can more easily work out their problems inside of family and community. Conversely, where family and community are weak, we are very much left on our own to deal with our own problems, and a therapist, rather than a family, has to help us.

If Rieff is right, and I suspect he is, then it follows that the answers to many of the issues that drive us to the counseling couch lie as much, and perhaps more, in a fuller and healthier participation within public life, including church life, than in private therapy. We need, as Parker Palmer brilliantly suggests, the therapy of a public life.

What is meant by this? How does public life heal and strengthen us?

In brief, public life (life within family and community, beyond our private selves and beyond our private intimacies) is therapeutic because it draws us beyond ourselves into the lives of others, gives us a certain rhythm, and connects us with resources beyond the poverty of our own limitations.

To participate healthily in other people’s lives takes us beyond our own obsessions. It also steadies us. Most public life has a certain rhythm and regularity to it that helps calm the chaotic whirl of our private lives, which are often racked with disorientation, depression, restlessness, and an almost infinite variety of obsessions. Participation in public life gives us clearly defined things to do, regular stopping places, regular events of structure and steadiness, a rhythm — commodities no psychiatric couch can provide. Public life links us to resources beyond ourselves.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example. While doing studies in Belgium, I was privileged to attend the lectures of Antoine Vergote, a renowned doctor of both psychology and the soul. I asked him one day how one should handle paralyzing emotional obsessions, both within oneself and when trying to help others.

His answer surprised me. In essence, he said this: “The temptation you might have, as a priest, is to too simplistically follow the religious edict: ‘Take your troubles to the chapel! Pray it all through. God will help you.’ It’s not that this is wrong. God and prayer can and do help. But obsessional problems are mainly problems of over-concentration, and over-concentration is broken largely by getting outside of yourself, outside of your own mind, heart, life — and room! And so my advice is: Get involved in public things, from entertainment, to politics, to work. Get outside of your closed world. Enter more into public life!”

He went on, of course, to qualify this so that it differs considerably from any simplistic temptation to simply bury oneself in distractions and work. His advice here is not that one should run away from doing painful inner work, but that solving one’s inner private problems is dependent upon outside relationships, both of intimacy and of a more public nature.

In support of this, I offer another example. For more than a dozen years I taught theology at a theological college. Many is the emotionally unstable student, fraught with every kind of inner pain and unsteadiness, who would show up at our college and slowly get emotionally steadier and stronger, and that strength and steadiness came not so much from the theology courses, but from the rhythm and health of the community life. These students got well not so much from what they learned in the classrooms as they did by participating in the life outside of them. The therapy of a public life is what helped heal them.

And for us as Christians, the therapy of public life also means the therapy of church life. We become emotionally better, steadier, less obsessed, less a slave to our own restlessness, and more able to become what we want to be by participating fully and healthily within the public life of the church. Monks, with their monastic rhythm, have long understood this and have a secret worth knowing, namely, a regular program, a daily rhythm, participation in community, the demand that we show up, and the discipline of the monastic bell that calls us to activities, not when we want them but when they are set for us, have kept many a man and woman sane, and relatively happy besides.

Regular Eucharist, regular prayer with others, regular meetings with others, regular duties, and regular responsibilities within ministry not only nurture our spiritual lives; they keep us sane and steady. Private therapy can sometimes be helpful in supplementing this, but public, ecclesial life, with its peculiar rhythms and demands, is what, first of all and most of all, keeps us steady on our feet.

“Nothing resembles the language of God so much as does silence.”

Meister Eckhard wrote those words. What do they mean? Among other things, they speak of a deep mystery.

What language will we speak in heaven? We don’t know, but we have some inkling of it in the deep experiences of intimacy we have on earth. In our deepest experiences of intimacy and communion, we come together beyond words, in a silence that isn’t empty but is too full for words. In heaven, I suspect, just as in our deepest experiences of intimacy here, there won’t be a need for words. We will know and be known in a language beyond ordinary words, in the language of intimacy and the language of God.

We already experience this somewhat. Sometimes, for instance, we understand someone or feel understood by someone intuitively, beyond words, beyond anything we’ve ever spoken to each other, and often this understanding is deeper than the understanding we come to through normal conversation.

The same is true for intimacy within community. I remember doing a 30-day Ignatian retreat some years ago. About sixty of us were on the retreat and we arrived there as total strangers. The thirty days were spent in silence, except for celebrating Eucharist together each day in the chapel. We ate our meals in silence, never recreated with each other, and never, except for two very brief occasions early on in the retreat, had any conversations with each other at all. Yet, when the retreat ended we had the feeling that we knew each other more deeply than we would have had we socialized and talked during those days. The silence was a powerful language, stronger than words, and it brought us into community in a way that words often cannot.

I’ve experienced this too inside of religious community. I am a member of a missionary order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and one of the things our founder, St. Eugene de Mazenod, mandated for us was that, each day, we should sit together as a community in chapel for a long period of silence. My experience has been that whenever we do this, something akin to a “Quaker silence”, the silent time spent together does more to bind us into community than do any number of community meetings. Silence is a special language.

But that doesn’t put silence in opposition to words. Silence and words need each other. Words take on greater power when they issue forth from silence, just as they begin to lose their force when they are constant and never-ending. Conversely silence is more powerful after we have already come to know each other through words. There are things that we can only know through silence, just as there are things we can only know through conversations inside of a community.

That is why solitude is such paradox: Solitude, as we know, is not defined as being alone, but as being at peace, as being restful rather than restless. And we all know the strange anomalies that can happen here: Sometimes we are at a celebration with others, but we are too restless to enjoy the occasion or even to be present to it. Socializing with others paradoxically serves to heighten our restlessness and disquiet. Conversely, sometimes we are alone, away from others, but are restful, comfortable, and at peace inside of our own lives. Being alone paradoxically works to still our disquiet and silence is what brings us into community.

And so it is important that we try to learn the language of silence, just as we also try to learn the words that can help us know each other. There is a huge silence undergirding us and inside of us that is trying to draw us into itself. To enter that silence is to enter the reality of God and the reality of our real communion with each other. For this reason, all great religious traditions and all great spiritual writers emphasize the need for silence at times in our lives.

Sadly, we are too often afraid of silence, afraid of being alone, afraid of what we might meet there. Too often silence speaks to us of loneliness, of missing out on life, of being disconnected, of a being a tomb of non-life. And so we cling to each other and look for conversations, amusements, and distractions that can fill in the silent spaces in our lives. Ultimately this running away from silence is founded unconsciously on the fear that, deep down, something is missing, both inside of the world and inside ourselves and we are best to cling to whatever can protect us from that painful truth.

But that fear is unfounded. As Thomas Merton put it, there is a hidden wholeness at the heart of things and that hidden wholeness can only be discovered if we get to the deepest level of things. And the language we need to get there is the language of silence – the language of God and the language of intimacy.

Eric Liddel, the Olympic gold medallist and runner whose story was told in the movie, Chariots of Fire, once made this comment: “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” That’s good theology. We feel God’s pleasure in us whenever we do something well.

If that’s true, and it is, then we know something is good for us if God takes pleasure in us doing it. But how do we discern that?

Donald Cozzens, in a recent book, relates this to the question of loneliness and asks: Does God take pleasure in our loneliness just because loneliness invariably deepens us? What kinds of loneliness are good for the heart and what kinds aren’t? He cautions that we must discern this carefully. Not every kind of loneliness deepens us in the right way.

He’s right. There are kinds of loneliness that beset us that are neither good for us nor pleasing to God. Sometimes the restlessness and emptiness we feel are there because we are doing something wrong or because something is wrong in us. Selfishness, self-indulgence, infidelity, betrayal, sin, or sickness all can trigger a fierce loneliness, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we will benefit from the pain. Sometimes too loneliness and restlessness are caused by something we are not doing, like entering enough into solitude and into our own silence.

In these cases, while the loneliness might still teach us something, God takes no pleasure in it. Rather the loneliness indicates that something is wrong.

However there are kinds of loneliness, whose sting is just as painful, that are signs of health, signs that we are doing something right, signs that we are where we should be. When we suffer these types of loneliness, we feel God’s pleasure in us, not because we are suffering but because we are doing something right.

In what kinds of loneliness do we feel God’s pleasure?

The loneliness of Gethsemane, of having to sweat blood in order to be faithful, of self-sacrifice, lets us feel God’s pleasure, as too does the loneliness that comes from entering healthily into our own solitude and silence. These kinds of loneliness beset us not because we are doing something wrong or because there is something wrong in us. Rather, in these instances, we are lonely because we are doing something right and are being healthily sensitive and faithful.

Loneliness of this kind stretches the heart, makes us more empathic, shows us where the threads of compassion lie, and makes us deeper as persons by putting us in touch with the immensity of God, of others, of the world, and of our own souls. In this kind of loneliness we intuit the deeper meaning of things.

Indeed nothing is more beneficial to us in terms of coming to depth and maturity as is the right kind of loneliness. Our successes may bring pleasure and glory into our lives, but they rarely bring depth. Loneliness is what makes us deep. But it can make us deep too in the wrong way. This is the algebra: Loneliness will make us deep, but it can make us deep too in anger and bitterness just as easily as in gratitude and compassion.

And God does not take pleasure in this. God takes pleasure only when our loneliness deepens us in the right way. And loneliness can deepen us in that way:

“Every tear brings the Messiah closer.” “It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of spirit is brought forth.” “The person who loses his or her life will find it.” “Unless a grain of wheat falls in the ground and dies, it cannot bring forth new life.”

Each of these axioms teaches us that there is certain kind of loneliness that is not only beneficial to us but is in fact the only route to depth, empathy, and selflessness. But, as we shall see, that depends upon how we undergo that pain.

In the Gospels, we see an incident where two disciples, James and John, come to Jesus and ask him if they might have the seats of glory at his right hand and at his left hand.

Jesus asks them in return: “Can you drink of the cup (of suffering)?” They answer, “Yes, we can.” Jesus then tells them something to this effect: “Indeed, you will drink the cup of suffering – everyone will! But you might not get the glory! Suffering will make you deep, but it can just as easily make you deep in bitterness. You will only get the glory if you undergo your suffering in the right way!”

God takes pleasure in us when we do things right, when we exercise the talents He gave us and find satisfaction and fulfilment in that. When we do well what God meant for us to do, we feel God’s pleasure.

But God, like a good parent watching a child mature, also takes pleasure in us when loneliness and suffering open and stretch our hearts in ways that make us deeper, more compassionate, and less selfish.

The most singularly consoling doctrine in all of religion is the Christian belief that Christ descended into hell.

Christ descended into hell. What is meant by that?

There is an old understanding that interprets the phrase this way: After the original sin of Adam and Eve, the gates of heaven were closed and nobody was able to go to heaven until Christ came and paid the price for our sin. But then, after Jesus died, in that time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, he went to that underworld place where all the good people who had died since the time of Adam and Eve waited and he opened up for them the gates to paradise. Christ’s going to that place of the dead (mythically imagined geographically, but theologically conceived of spiritually) was understood as Christ’s descent into hell.

However there is an even older understanding of this doctrine which, while not denying the essence of what was just said, interprets it this way: The descent into hell highlights something in the way that Jesus lived and died.

First of all, we see this in the way that Jesus lived and revealed God’s presence: We see in gospels, time and again, that Jesus goes into all the dark, taboo places and takes God’s light and love there. The ultimate dark, taboo place of course is hell itself.

And we see this most clearly in Jesus’ death: When we look at the way that Jesus died, we see that in his death he “descended into hell”, that he went into a place and space of utter alienation and complete darkness where he was, outside of everything except raw faith, completely cut off from community, life, and God. There, in that place where he was so utterly alienated and alone, he was able to breath out the spirit of God and of life.

What does that mean for us? Let me try to explain by using a series of image:

In the Gospel of John, the evangelist describes how the resurrected Jesus appeared to the disciples. He tells that the disciples were “huddled together in a locked room, in fear” and that Jesus (twice) came right through the locked doors, stood in the middle of them, and breathed out peace. These images are significant and powerful: “they were huddled in fear”; “Jesus entered through the locked doors”; “Jesus stood in the midst of them and said, ‘Peace be with you’.”

In St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, there hangs a famous painting, The Light of the World, by Holman Hunt. It shows Christ with a lantern, knocking on a door, waiting for it to be opened from the inside. A redacted version of this, made into a holy card, circulates in pious circles. It shows Christ, with a lantern, knocking on a door on which there is no door-knob on the outside. There is only a knob on the inside and there, huddled in fear, depression, and paranoia, stands a man who is obviously faced with the choice : Open the door and let Christ in or keep Christ waiting outside! The obvious implication is: Only you can open that door! The picture suggests that this particular man might be too depressed to be up to the task.

There is a legitimate challenge in this image: There are certain doors that we must open in order to let Christ into our lives. In another sense however, this is a bad holy card. If it’s right, then the Gospel of John is wrong because, after the resurrection, with the disciples huddled in fear inside of a room, Jesus does not stand and knock, waiting, saying: “Only you can open that door!” He comes right through the locked doors, stands in the middle of the circle of fear, breathes out the Holy Spirit, and says: “Do not be afraid! Peace be with you!”

Several years ago, some family friends of mine had a 19 year-old daughter who became severely depressed and attempted suicide. They rallied round her, took her to the best doctors and psychiatrists, and tried every possible way of having their love break through the shell of her sickness and alienation. It didn’t work. Eventually she killed herself. All the love in the world and all the best medicine and psychiatry could not any more penetrate inside her private hell. Her family could not “descend into hell” and open up for her the gates of life and community. They were helpless before her darkness, her hell.

But Christ can descent into that, and into every hell that can be created. That’s what the descent into hell means. There is no hell that Christ cannot penetrate, no locked door he cannot go through. When this young woman woke up on the other side of this life, I am certain that she found Christ standing in the middle of her huddled fear and loneliness breathing out the spirit of community and joy and saying: “Do not be afraid. Peace with you!”

Sometimes you don’t have to open the door!

During my last years of seminary training, I attended a series of lectures given by a prominent Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski, teaching at the time at the University of Alberta. He had written a number of books around a concept he called “positive disintegration”.

Positive disintegration. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Isn’t disintegration the opposite of growth and happiness?

It would seem not. A canon of wisdom drawn from the scriptures of all the major world religions, mystical literature, philosophy, psychology, and human experience tells us that the journey to maturity and compassion is extremely paradoxical and that mostly we grow by falling apart.

Ancient myths talk about the need sometimes to “descend into the underworld”, to live in darkness for a while, to sit in ashes so as to move to a deeper place inside of life; the mystics talk about “dark nights of the soul” as being necessary to bring about maturity; Ignatius of Loyola teaches that there is a place for both “consolation” and “desolation” in our lives; the philosopher, Karl Jaspers, suggests that the journey to full maturity demands that we sometimes journey in “the norm of night” and not just in “the norm of day”; the Jewish scriptures assure us that certain deep things can only happen to the soul when it is helpless and exposed in “the desert” or “the wilderness” and that sometimes, like Jonah, we need to be carried to some place where we’d rather not go “in the dark belly of the whale”; and, perhaps most challenging of all, we see that Jesus was only brought to full compassion through “sweating blood in Gethsemane” and then dying a humiliating death on the cross.

All of these images point to the same deep truth, sometimes in order to grow we must first fall apart, go into the dark, lose our grip on what’s normal, enter into a frightening chaos, lose our everyday securities, and be carried in pain to a place where, for all kinds of reasons, we weren’t ready to go to on our own.

Why? Isn’t there a more pleasant route to maturity?

James Hillman answers this with this image: The best wines have to be aged in cracked, old barrels. And so too the human soul, it mellows, takes on character, and comes to compassion only when there are real cracks, painful ones, in the body and life of the one who carries it. Our successes, he says, bring us glory, while our pain brings us character and compassion. Pain, and sometimes only pain, serves to mellow the soul.

But almost every instinct inside of us resists this wisdom. We don’t like living in tension, try at all costs to avoid pain, fear chaos, are ashamed of our humiliations, and panic when our old securities fall away and we are left in the dark, unsure of things. So our natural instinct is to get out of the darkness and tension as quickly as possible, before the pain has had its chance to mellow our souls, purify our hearts, bring us to a deeper level of maturity and compassion, and do its full purifying work within us.

And, sometimes, we are helped in this escape by well-meaning therapists and spiritual directors who don’t want to see us in pain and therefore try to cure the situation rather than properly care for the soul inside the situation. They want to restore us to normality and good functioning because, as Thomas Moore puts it, they can’t envision us fulfilling our fate and discovering the deeper meaning of our lives.

And so what we need when we are in a “dark night” isn’t the well- intentioned sympathy of a friend who wants to rescue us from the pain, but the wisdom of the mystics who tell us: When you lose your securities, when you find yourself in an emotional and spiritual free-fall, when you are in the belly of the whale, let go, detach yourself, let the pain carry you to where it needs to take you, don’t resist, rather weep, wail, cry, and put your mouth to the dust, and wait. Just wait. You are like a baby being weaned from its mother’s breast and forced to learn a new way of nourishing yourself. Anything you do to stop what’s happening will only delay the inevitable, the pain that must be gone through in order come to a new maturity.

Thomas Moore, in a recent book on Dark Nights of the Soul, offers this advice to anyone undergoing this kind of crisis of soul: “Care rather than cure. Organize your life to support the process. You are incubating your soul, not living a heroic adventure. Arrange your life accordingly. Tone it down. Get what comforts you can, but don’t move against the process. Concentrate, reflect, think, and talk about your situation seriously with trusted friends.”

Or, as Rainer Marie Rilke would advise: “Don’t be afraid to suffer, give the heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.”

The early years of my adulthood and priesthood were spent teaching theology at a College in Edmonton, Canada. They were exciting years: I was young, full of energy, loved teaching, and was discovering the joys of ministry. These were good years, everything that young adulthood should be.

But they weren’t always easy years. My congenital restlessness, the demands of ministry, the tensions of community, the obsessions I’m forever prone to, the not-infrequent departure of cherished friends from the priesthood, and the constant movement of people through my life, occasionally left me in emotional chaos, gasping for oxygen, too restless to sleep, wondering who I was, saying to myself, like Janis Joplin in her moments of desperation: ‘Where is everybody going?’

But I had a little formula to help handle this. Whenever the chaos got really bad , I would get into my car and drive four hours to our family farm just across the border in Saskatchewan. My family still lived in the house I’d grown up in, ate at the same table I’d eaten at as a child, slept in the same beds we had as children, and walked the same ground I’d walked as a child. Usually it didn’t take long for home to do its work. I’d only need to be there for a meal or overnight and the chaos and heartache would subside, I’d begin to feel steady and to know again who I was.

Coming home didn’t cure the heartache but gave the heart the care it needed. Somehow home always works.

Today the same kind of emotional chaos and heartache can still unsettle me on occasion and leave me unsure of who I am, of the choices I’ve made in life, and of whom and what to trust. But I can’t often drive to my childhood home anymore and so I have had to find the steadying that going home once gave me in new a way. And, even amidst a good community, loving friends, and a wonderful job, that isn’t always easy to find. Home can be elusive on a restless night. What steadies the heart when it’s restless isn’t so easy to access. Once you’ve left home, you sometimes can’t get back there again.

So what do I do now when I need to go home and retouch my roots to steady myself? Sometimes a trusted friend is the answer; sometimes a family that has become family to me can provide that special place, sometimes I can find that place in prayer or in nature, but sometimes I can’t find it at all and I have to live with the chaos until, like a bad storm, it blows over.

But through the years, I’ve also discovered that sometimes a special book that can take me home in the same way as driving there once did. One of the books that does this for me, almost without fail, is The Story of a Soul by Therese of Lisieux. Not surprising, it’s the story of a recessive journey, the story of Thereseâs own effort at recapturing what her house, home, and family once gave her.

But the recessive journey in itself is not what gives this book (which I highly recommend for anyone who’s heart is aching in way that unsettles the soul) such a special power. Many autobiographies unsettle more than they settle. Remembering alone doesn’t necessarily care for the heart and sometimes our memories of home and childhood carry a lot of pathology and pain. Not everyone’s home was safe and nurturing.

What The Story of a Soul does is what a good home does; it names and claims for us what’s deepest and most precious inside of the human person. That’s what gives the soul the steadying it needs.

What is that place? Home is where we can shut the door on the outside world, where a warm fire is burning, where we can eat familiar foods, where we don’t have to be on guard when we speak, where we can be sick and somebody takes care of us, where we can sleep in our own beds, where a trusted hand steadies the world, where we can be weak, and where we can shut the door and lock out every kind of storm and restlessness. Home is where we are safe. It’s also the place where, one way or the other, we learned about God. (And it’s this that is so tragically and irrevocably destroyed in sexual abuse.) I used to drive four hours, just for a meal or a night’s sleep, in order to find that. Today, among other places, I find it when I read The Story of a Soul.

There are headaches and heartaches for which there is no cure. But the soul doesn’t need to be cured, only to be properly cared for. Our task is go home, to find those people, places, prayers, and books that truly care for our souls at those times when our world is falling apart.